Last night Gary finished up the kitchen for me, by hanging a set of shelves.  So here it is...

Before

You might recall that this house didn't have a fridge, so we took measurements back before Thanksgiving, and drove into town to Home Depot.  They already had their black Friday sale going on, and we found a fridge just like I wanted side by side, ice maker in the door, and black.  Gary's only request was that it have two separate dispensers -  one for ice and another for water.  Half of the new machines, you have to practically beat to make them change settings.  We decided to try a counter depth fridge this time, since the kitchen is on the narrow side.  It's a bit of a squeeze for us both to be in there working at the same time.  Before we ordered it, I asked Gary to double check the measurements.  See he had narrowed down the list at work, and then I went with him to pick something out.  Only problem is that he had left the notebook in the car, but he was sure the width of the space was 36 inches, I thought the depth was 36.  We waited a week for it to arrive, and when it did, it didn't fit.  The space was 32 inches wide.  They left the fridge, with plans for us to call Home Depot and swap it out.  But Gary got to looking, and I could only fit one of those smaller, old fashion fridges in a space so narrow.  Since I go grocery shopping once a month, that wasn't going to work.  We opted to just keep the fridge on the edge of the kitchen into the dining room.  One of these days I'm hoping that we can completely gut the kitchen.  We'd like to widen the walk space take out the wall and have an island.  I have doodled out some blueprints, and we have a ball park figure of $15-20K that we need to save in a few years after the student loans are finished up end of 2018.  But for now the fridge doesn't really bother me that much.  The only really annoying thing, is that I'm going to have to learn to wash dishes backwards, since there's no room for the drying stuff on the normal side of the sink for me.

After

After

However, since we didn't have a fridge in the kitchen we had this big empty space that wasn't being used.  Since we have a shortage of cabinet space, we talked about finding some sort of shelving system.  Turns out Mom and Dad had some shelves in the shed that they had taken out of the house.  We were planning to use them in the laundry room, and when we found out just how many piece there were, we realized we could use them in both spaces.  We moved the toaster oven there, and plugged it in up there, in the old fridge plug space.  We also got new pots and pans for Christmas.  Gary had been eyeing these for a little while.  The pots and pans we had.  He got before we got married, and they weren't that great, just some cheap ones from Walmart.  It was time after 10 years to replace them, since they were such low quality we were having problems with some of them.  Between Mother and Daddy and then Grandmother and Granddaddy Gary got all the ones Red Copper makes.  I had them in a drawer, but decided they were pretty enough to set out on the shelves, and that gave me some drawers to store the last of my big Tupperware pieces.














Other than that the rest is pretty self explanatory.  It's really amazing what the blue-grey paint did for the space.  I used it all through the common areas of the house, and it's really more blue than I expected it to be, but I have LOVED how it turned out.  The biggest surprise though was what it did for the kitchen space.  I debated putting it in there or not, because I didn't want to make such a small space too dark.  But I couldn't leave it dingy looking like it was, and so we had just enough paint left over to do the kitchen.  It really brings out the grey flecks in the granite, and makes the red oak in the cabinets pop.  Because there's not a place for the trash can and the pantry isn't deep at all, I just sat it out, and went ahead and got a second one for the aluminium cans we collect.














The pantry was another difficult project for Gary.  It needed painting, and the shelves weren't in good shape, but they were built in.  He had to cut them apart to get them out. Then he had to roll it alot, because come to find out that entire closet is concrete.  I wanted some adjustable shelves put in so that I could figure out how far they needed to be spaced as I went, and so if I decided to redo the layout in there later, I could.  Gary also took some of the wall hooks in the laundry room and moved two of them to the pantry for me to hang bags of potatoes and bags of onions for storage.  It worked out pretty well.  I like one thing about this kitchen better than the last rental.  I have good sight lines to all of the house, with the exception of the back porch.  I can see into the hallway space between the kids bedrooms, into the dining room and living room.  With the french doors open, I can still hear what's going on on the back porch even if I can't see them.  And as loud as they are, that's nearly the same thing.


This room is probably the least changed, I mean it's not like we gutted the kitchen yet or anything, but I still thought I'd share it.